Stephanie Schroeder: Reject discourse that denigrates children

Friday

Apr 14, 2017 at 2:00 AMApr 14, 2017 at 8:31 AM

By Stephanie Schroeder Special to The Sun

It has been a bad couple months to be a schoolchild in the United States. Not only has Betsy DeVos been confirmed as the education secretary, but political commentators and President Trump himself have been making increasingly unkind comparisons to our country’s youth in order to make sense of contemporary politics.

From Andrew Rosenthal’s opinion piece in the New York Times headlined, “Donald Trump, Middle School President,” to stories in the Washington Post comparing Trump to a “clueless child,” to The Daily Show’s browser extension that allows viewers to read Trump’s tweets in child’s scrawl, to Trump himself comparing federal judges to “bad” high school students, our nation’s youth have been used as both pawns and whipping boys in recent weeks. Characterized as whiny, irrational and bored on the one hand and in desperate need of saving on the other, adolescents have recently borne a disproportionate brunt of misguided political rhetoric.

Two interlocking ideologies resound in these troubling media narratives. The first of these ideologies is the white savior complex, exacerbated by (and perhaps a product of) the second ideology, deficit thinking. Both narratives plague our educational systems and popular consciousness, and both should be roundly rebuked for their shortsightedness.

Christopher Emdin, associate professor at Columbia University, argues that the white savior complex “exotic-izes youth and positions them as automatically broken." In a classroom context, the white savior complex “falsely positions the teacher, oftentimes a white teacher, as hero.”

DeVos, a billionaire philanthropist who has never actually taught anything, is certainly not the white hero teacher, but still very much embodies this ideology. In DeVos’s narrative, the traditional public school system is positioned as the culprit behind high failure rates, particularly in the inner city. Rather than improving neighborhood schools, DeVos and her foundations have poured money into charter school alternatives, often outside of the neighborhoods where poor and minority children reside. The goal, ostensibly, is to “save” poor and minority children from the failing public school, yet the outcome, like the outcome of the white savior complex in the classroom, has “set the kids up to fail and the educators up to fail.”

Children and parents deserve more. They deserve an investment in their own community schools that are rich in cultural traditions, well supported by tax-dollars, transparent in their business dealings and accountable to the public. To offer anything less is an insult.

Investing in neighborhood schools will require a dramatic shift in a public consciousness. As the rhetoric swirling in the media suggests, Americans appear entrenched in deficit thinking, particularly about children. It will take finding value not only in the promise of public education, but of the students who are currently failing in that system, to “fix” our failing schools.

The educational establishment broadly viewed — encompassing the DeVos family foundation and other charter advocates, teachers' unions and traditional teacher education programs, as well as the mainstream media — must shoulder the blame for reproducing deficit thinking and the white savior mentality. Both ideologies view children as what Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade calls “glasses half empty,” or as lacking fundamental features that will enable them to succeed.

Trump’s comment about “a bad high school student” and Rosenthal’s comparison of Trump to a whiny, annoying middle school adolescent are prime examples of deficit thinking, and, particularly Rosenthal’s account, unfair comparisons to the majority of middle school students that grace our classrooms with their presence.

As a nation we must not view children as objects to be saved, nor should we view them as the worst of their personality traits. We should also not view them, or our public schools for that matter, as “bad,” a static and demeaning marker that positions individuals and schools as incapable of change or growth.

What we should demand instead is better, more nuanced political commentary that does not rely on faulty comparisons that denigrate children. We should also demand an educational establishment, broadly defined, that is willing to see children, communities and schools, so long viewed as “the problem,” as glasses half full. Doing both of these things requires the acknowledgement and rejection of both the white savior complex and deficit ideology that seem to dominate the contemporary public discourse.

— Stephanie Schroeder is a doctoral student in curriculum, teaching and teacher education at the University of Florida College of Education.